Just the Desserts from the 18 Best New Cookbooks

Have you ever noticed how cookbooks wait until the very last chapters to give us their best recipes—the cakes, pies, crumbles, cookies, doughnuts, ice creams, and, fine, [rolls eyes] granitas? Maybe this is the “save the best for last policy,” but we prefer our desserts a little earlier in the course of the day, say, leftover pie for breakfast, an afternoon lunch cookie with coffee, maybe a second one at around four P.M. after e-mails pile up, and then finally, yes, after dinner. (We live by the hobbit philosophy of eating.) So we flipped to the back of the book in fall’s 18 best new cookbooks and collected the most mouth-watering, coma-inducing photos of desserts. Consider this a fair warning.

Jocelyn Delk Adams is a baking blogger whose cookbook, Grandbaby Cakes, we’ve been patiently awaiting as we do in front of the oven door when the cake timer is about to go off. Just look at this leaning tower of Oreo-topped triple-layer mudslide cake! Mudsliding its way into our hearts, that is.

Almond meringue transports this cake from the clichéd hot tub snack of strawberries and cream to a Damn, Look at That Cake level of sophistication. In Darra Goldstein’s cookbook full of herring, whitefish, and anchovies recipes, this cake was a welcome diversion. But then again we are easily distracted by cakes.

The sticky lemon glaze on the stop of this cake from the year’s best single-subject cookbook, Citrus, by Valerie Aikman-Smith and Victoria Pearson, is the kind of thing we could picture ourselves taking a bath in. Too much information? Sorry.

Chili-chocolate tacos are Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman’s grand finale in Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, and they hit our every craving for dessert sandwiches, dessert pizzas, and all of the usual suspects more often found in buffet lineups.

Dominique Crenn manipulates food into edible fairy tales at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. If you can wrap your head around this, it’s a dessert of sake sorbet inside a seashell coated in coconut ash gel. And this course is considered a *pre-*dessert, by the way, a snack for a little mermaid. Also inside: pineapple water with blue-green algae, coconut-kasu mousse, and spirulina seaweed tuile. “Cooking” doesn’t begin to describe her art.

Why have sprinkles when you can have huge chunks of sea salt decorating your brownies? These caramel-coated ooey-gooey squares from The New Sugar and Spice, by Samantha Seneviratne, are the antidote to all that is wrong in the world.

Coconut oil, coconut cream, and coconut flakes are the holy trinity of this toasted tropical cake from Eric Werner and Mya Henry of Hartwood in trendy Tulum, Mexico. We consider any cake with cream cheese in it to be “breakfast cake,” so good morning!

If blueberry tortes could be moody, this one from Food52’s baking Bible is giving us its best fashion week pout. “Oh I’m just sitting here in the shadows, artfully dripping blueberry syrup, please leave me alone.” Sorry, torte, but you were made for eating.

True to its title, Lucky Peach: 101 Easy Asian Recipes ends on a simple kicker: those perfect half moons of oranges that arrive at your table after a feast of Chinese food. But it wouldn’t be Lucky Peach if it wasn’t both funny and educational, with a short essay on the nuances of different Asian desserts.

If you’re making your own ice cream, this Turkish coffee and cardamom version from Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking by Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook, is sweet and a little bitter—very grownup, until you find yourself eating it for breakfast.

Quite possibly the most Instagrammed restaurant dessert in New York City, Enrique Olvera’s corn husk meringue is a salty-sweet stroke of genius that, if we say so ourselves, reminded us a little of corn pops—heaven.

Is there a better picture of “portion control” than this single-serving blackberry cobbler? We think not. Likewise, those little dots in the ice cream to the left are individual blackberry pods, to give you a sense of how detail-oriented this epic cookbook within a cookbook is (the NoMad cocktail cookbook comes nestled inside like a flask).

Pretty in pink! Nootka roses and salmonberries are not inventions by Willy Wonka, but actual things found in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. If you’re having nightmares of earthquakes and don’t think you’ll be traveling there anytime soon, Blaine Wetzel and Joe Ray’s Sea and Smoke cookbook can provide your escape.

These moon pies are so necessary for the bloodstream that someone took a huge bite before it even finished cooling. Blessed be the editors of Garden and Gun, for this cookbook of comfort foods, regionally diverse BBQ sauces, and desserts with a drawl.

The recipe for these jasmine jellies in Hong Thaimee’s True Thai: Real Flavors for Every Table, doesn’t say whether the serving size is all eight jellies, so we’re going to go with: yes. If you want to shake things up this Thanksgiving, try Thaimee’s red-curry pumpkin pie.

Alice Waters ingenue Claire Ptak’s Violet Bakery Cookbook is a home baker’s, and a home-baked-goods-eater’s, dream. Approachable, unfussy recipes yield gorgeous results. And can we talk about the art of frosting on this cake?